Kipling paid a heavy personal price for his bombastic jingoism. He pulled strings to land his reluctant 15-year-old son a position in the Irish Guards when WW1 broke out. His son was killed after a couple of weeks in the trenches. Kipling’s writings took a bitter turn and lost their blind glorification of militarism and conquest.
As Kipling went, so did Britain. It took being bled white and financially ruined by WW1 to cure Britain of most of its jingoism and imperial arrogance. WW2 took care of the rest.

I wonder what level of suffering it will take to cure the warmongering coward chickenhawks of America of their diseased illusions.

[above social theory may be discredited, out of fashion or just plain wrong]

Force Ratios:
Japan:
~200,000 Allied troops, ~70 million Japanese. 1 occupier per 350 occupied. http://history.acusd.edu/gen/W…..japan.html

Iraq:
~150,000 troops, ~25 million Iraqis. 1 occupier per 167 occupied.

iirc, a force of about 10% of the population is required to defeat an insurgency, that number would include allies, national armed forces, police & the security arm. ymmv.

best regards,
that upside-down lower-case e.

As for the force ratios, I’ll have to go back through my old bookmarks for the source reseach I filed away somewhere. This is a tough week for me to do that as I work full time and am very busy, but I’ll get to it as soon as I can.

Thanks for the comments and questions! Hope you’ll stick around.

I’m still confused about your comparison of force-levels. The ratio of occupiers to occupied in 2005 Iraq (not counting Iraqi government forces) is roughly twice that of 1946 Japan.

I’ll agree that reconstruction in Japan was more successful than it will be in Iraq. It’s a safe bet that any funds-corruption that occurred in Japan was an insignificant fraction compared to Iraq. I’m certain that President Truman would never have prevented investigations of corruption w/ some cheesy signing statement.

But I disagree w/ your statement “The mythology of the British Empire, the subject of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Gunga Din”, was founded on racist fantasies of a white man’s burden.” While Kipling was an avid imperialist, lots of his work paid tribute to non-white people & socially disadvantaged Europeans. Today, one might call him an apologist for racism – but 100 years ago, he was an irrepressible (and highly-respected) social conscious. Kinda like some bloggers!

Construction funds to Iraq have lined U. S. companies but not resulted in actual reconstuction. There are also billions missing.

I think your article contains some errors of fact wrt the US occupation of Japan:
“We had a huge ratio of conquering forces on the ground relative to total population size” – The US & British Commonwealth forces that occupied the Japanese home islands amounted to less than 200,000 troops, a tiny %age of Japan’s population. [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Commonwealth_Occupation_Force]
“conditions made it possible to enact the visionary, Democrat-designed Marshall Plan for rebuilding and recovery” – Japan received no aid from the European Recovery Act (Marshall Plan). Rather, it got GARIOA (Government Appropriations for Relief in Occupied Areas) funds, & ‘repaid’ ~25% of those funds. Total US reconstruction monies for Iraq are currently roughly double the amounts (in 2005 dollars) granted to Japan from 1945-52.[www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33331.pdf]